Touchtone Data Entry

Touchtone data entry (TDE) is a method used with telephone surveys to enable the respondent to directly enter information using the keypad on his or her phone rather than speaking the information to an interviewer. The technology is the same as that used extensively by financial institutions and customer service contact centers. The applications of TDE for survey research include the following:

• As a cost-saving method where the interviewer is replaced by pre-recorded questions delivered by the computer. This is called IVR/TDE, where IVR refers to interactive voice response, and differs from IVR/ASR (automatic speech recognition) in that the latter uses speech recognition in place of TDE.
• To reduce respondent burden when only a small amount of information is needed. For example, respondents to a quarterly business survey might have the option of returning a short paper form, entering the information via a Web site, or dialing in the information using TDE.
• To increase respondent convenience. TDE systems are usually operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• To provide additional privacy for sensitive questions within an interviewer-administered survey, as the response will not be overheard by someone else in the same room as the respondent (e.g., a parent overhearing a teenager), and the system can be configured to prevent the interviewer from seeing the information entered.

Because of the limitations of most telephone keypads (only 12 keys, including # and ∗), TDE is best used only for binary responses (e.g., “enter 1 for Yes, 2 for No”), limited choice sets (e.g., “1 for Yes, 2 for No, 3 for Undecided), and simple numeric entry (e.g., “Please enter your year of birth in four digits“).

Other numeric information can be collected via TDE, but additional read-back checks (e.g., “You entered 10 thousand and 43 dollars, is that correct? Press 1 for Yes, 2 for No”) are necessary because many phones do not have a visual display whereby the respondent can readily see if he or she made an error.

Drawbacks of TDE include the following:

• The need for the respondent to have a touchtone phone
• The increasing tendency of phones to have the keypad embedded in the handset (such as with cordless and mobile phones), making TDE physically awkward as the respondent juggles trying to listen with trying to respond
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• Very limited options regarding text, as opposed to numeric, entry due to the many-to-one relationship between alpha characters to numeric keys on keypads
• The need to keep the TDE component of a survey very short and simple (Few people can recall more than four menu items, and if that is combined with a lengthy question administered by a mechanical voice that cannot respond to respondent queries, the respondent may become frustrated and give up.)
• The risk of lower response rates, if a live interviewer who can keep the respondent engaged and motivated is not present